This Is No Time for Passive Patriotism
Every nation is a story. It’s almost never a simple one, and the story’s meaning is usually contested. National identity itself depends upon how we tell the story—about our past, our present moment, and our future.
Many national stories are rooted in a particular ethnicity or religion that forms the core of that national identity. Here in the United States, things are more complicated. Since our founding, our national identity has been the story that we tell ourselves and the wider world. Consider, for example: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. And: We the people, in order to form a more perfect union. Americans possess the beginnings of a fantastically good story, one based on something different from ethnicity or religion. Yet throughout our history, the most profound divisions in American society have required us to focus on the meaning of our loftiest words: Who is the we? What is the union? Put another way: What does the story mean, and who gets to tell it?
Rarely in our history have the answers to these questions been more contested, with the very fate of American democracy hanging in the balance. Former President Donald Trump’s Republican Party embraces fundamentally reactionary answers to these questions. In doing so, Trump taps into a vein that has run through the American body politic since our founding. The United States, in the most simplistic telling of the story, is a fundamentally ethno-nationalist construction: a white, Christian nation that embraces capitalism and a sense of its own exceptionalism.
[Robert P. Jones: White Christian America needs a moral awakening]
Trump’s movement, like many nationalist authoritarian movements around the world, defines the American by focusing more on an adversarial : a Black president, who must not have been born in America. Radical Islam, which wants to spread Sharia law in our communities..” George Soros, a shadowy financier (that is: a Jewish person) who wants to control the world. Communists, who want to destroy the country. All of these vaguely foreign forces represent a demographic future in which the United States becomes a majority-nonwhite country, and must be countered by an effort to Make America Great Again.
